It would not be overstating the case to say that when Steve Waugh took leave of Test cricket at the Sydney Cricket Ground early in 2004 and handed over the captaincy to Ricky Ponting, he sent down one of sport's great hospital passes.

Seventy-five matches have passed for Australia since then and Ponting has a record that would be the envy of any captain. And yet with each passing match, it seems, his team is diminished. He inherited genius and genius will take care of itself. Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie took 1,840 Test wickets between them. But gradually the bowlers that made Australia a truly great side fell away, irreplaceable each of them.

Up in the Channel Nine commentary box, as the runs piled up throughout the day at the Adelaide Oval, they were reduced to showing glory moments of Warne ripping the ball square out of the rough, or McGrath flying through the air to take his memorable catch in front of the crowd here four years ago almost to the day.

And on the field, Ponting chewed his nails to the quick, and, as the sun beat down on his perspiring bowlers, perhaps reflected on how once it was. Friends Beyond. "'Gone,' I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads," as Thomas Hardy put it in his poem of that name.

Doug Bollinger, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle want nothing for effort but the spinner Xavier Doherty looks way out of his depth at this level, little more than a clubbie who has found himself at the wrong match. The League Against Cruel Sports should be informed.

Certainly if he was brought in to test out Kevin Pietersen's supposed weakness to modest left-arm tweak, then even that plan went awry in as much as they had failed to factor in the possibility that he may not actually get to the crease while Jonathan Trott and Alastair Cook ploughed their relentless furrow and added a total of 502 runs before being separated.

Ponting has been reduced to marshalling depleted forces as best he can, making do and mending. After living the high life, he is a captain on benefits, searching for scraps. His pacemen are willing almost beyond the call, and hit the bat hard but do not come close to touching the heights.

And it was hot as Hades out there. In The Pickwick Papers, Mr Jingle describes his cricket in the West Indies: "bat in blisters, ball scorched brown" and at the Oval you could almost see the stands sizzle.

Goodness only knows what must have been the temperature beneath Doug's rug, but it must have come close to making his brain boil as he hurtled into the fray. In Harris, broad of shoulder and beam, he has Desperate Dan's stunt double, iron filings for stubble on his chin and cow pie for breakfast.

He swung the new ball a fraction, but the shine here lasts as long as a choc-ice on the pavement. Siddle throws himself so hard into the battle that he reminds of a fellow running to shoulder charge a locked door only to find it opened at the last second.

Sometimes honest endeavour is not enough, however. It has to be channelled into a strategy and backed in the field. Throughout the Australian innings, England's fielding was supremely good, brilliant at times: in extreme conditions, bowlers draw strength from that, knowing that it is not them alone who are sweating in the cause.

The bowlers knew their plans and were able to bowl to them. Give nothing to cut or pull, they were told, go wicket to wicket and make them drive you down the ground. Only a run-a-ball spendthrift spell from Steve Finn broke the mould.

Australia had their plans too but were not able to adhere to them, so that batsmen, knowing the bad ball is coming, can more comfortably play the good ones. There was no need to force the issue.

The captain's first response was to set his field to the offside, seven of them, so that his bowlers could blaze away their nagging width with impunity. The trouble is that neither Cook nor Trott is interested in bait dangled so transparently.

By mid-afternoon, it appeared that Ponting had little else left in the tank but to set his fielders back deep on the leg side and instruct his pacemen to hammer out the middle of the pitch in the hope that someone eventually would slog one up in the air. That was captaincy by blind optimism. Even the temptation to take the new ball with the day's end in sight was resisted until the last few overs. His bowlers were spent.

And by the day's end, when they dragged themselves from the field, the scoreboard showed that in the last 250 overs of endeavour they had taken only as many wickets, three, as England managed in 13 deliveries on Friday. Pigeon, Binger, Warney, Dizzy where are you when we need you?